Fresh Memories of Vietnam
September 21, 2017 at 9:50 am Ryan Jones 2 comments
The annual Penn State Forum speaker series kicked off Wednesday with guest speaker Doug Bradley, a Vietnam vet turned professor and co-author of We Gotta Get Out Of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War. Bradley talked about his experience and that of many of the vets he’s interviewed, played some of the classic songs of the era, and offered sometimes surprising context for how and why those songs so resonated with soldiers, both during and after the war.
Bradley’s appearance coincides with a flood of events and media, both nationally and at Penn State, marking 50 years since the height of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. WPSU is the driving force behind a multimedia project called A Time To Heal — The Vietnam War: Telling the Pennsylvania Story, a companion piece to the new Ken Burns documentary on PBS. The campus public broadcasting station is also sponsoring a visit by the Traveling Wall (pictured above), an 80 percent scale replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington, D.C. The wall will be on display at University Park Oct. 5-8.
Ryan Jones, deputy editor
Entry filed under: University Park. Tags: A Time To Heal, Doug Bradley, Penn State Forum, The Traveling Wall, Vietnam, WPSU.
1. Bill Cox | September 21, 2017 at 8:07 pm
Fifty years ago this month, I began my Penn State career as a Freshman. Vietnam was on everybody’s mind, even if they didn’t talk about it. We learned to separate patriotism from support of an ugly immoral war. Not easy years. Thanks WPSX/WPSU for being the intelligent voice of public affairs for over 50 years.
2. Dot | October 6, 2017 at 2:27 pm
Does anyone know if this is available as an audio book?